Early Modern Overseas Trade and Entrepreneurship

Nordic Trading Companies in the Seventeenth Century

Kaarle Wirta

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367332860
• eBook ISBN: 9781000079067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Economics

Drawing on an impressive range of archival material, this monograph delves into the careers of two businessmen who worked for Nordic chartered monopoly trading companies to illuminate individual entrepreneurship in the context of seventeenth-century long-distance trade.
The study spans the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, examining global entanglements through personal interactions and daily trading activities between Europeans, Asian merchants and African brokers. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role of individuals and their networks within the great European trading companies of the early modern period.
This unique book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of economic history, business history, early modern global history and entrepreneurship.

1 Introduction

State of the art

In 1648, the commander of the Danish East India Company (DEIC), Willem Leyel (ca. 1593–1654), suffered a mutiny and was arrested by his subordinates, being accused of having traded for his own benefit. Leyel had been the commander of the DEIC in Asia for some years and was able to maintain an active and profitable business thanks to his knowledge of the Indian Ocean trade, which he had acquired during his service in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Batavia.¹ Also in 1648, while Leyel was facing a mutiny in Tranquebar, the prosecutor of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), Henrich Carloff, decided to leave the company and take employment in the soon-to-be established Swedish Africa Company (SAC).² Like that of Leyel, Carloff’s career benefitted greatly from the knowledge and experience that he had accumulated in various trading companies, beginning with the WIC. After abandoning the WIC and later also the SAC, Carloff participated in the launching of both Danish and French Atlantic ventures, finally returning to Dutch employment in the 1670s.

From the perspective of business history, Leyel and Carloff serve to illustrate a hitherto overlooked category of early modern entrepreneurial behaviour, namely that of overseas entrepreneurship. This book’s main aim is to study overseas entrepreneurship in action, tracing their social and economic affiliations to European companies, reconstructing their role in early modern European overseas business, and interpreting their use of violence as part of their entrepreneurial strategies. While Leyel and Carloff embody the core features of overseas entrepreneurship, neither of them was unique by the standards of the seventeenth century; there were many similarly business-minded Europeans willing to join royal monopolies or chartered trading companies, only to abandon them when new opportunities arose. Some examples include Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo, Samuel Blommaert, Peter Minuit, Arent de Groot, Augustine Hermann, John Smith, Thomas Dale, Jacob Leisler, and François Caron.³ Indeed, such men effectively blurred the commercial borders imposed by European powers, particularly through their overseas entrepreneurial activities, their business connections, their social climbing, and their knowledge-accumulation. Although they have been studied by previous scholars, it is surprising how little is known about the role these entrepreneurs played in early modern European overseas business.

In this book, the focus is not on biographies but rather on the type of business behaviour that Leyel and Carloff represented. The book aims to analyse the role that individuals played in the development of overseas business during the seventeenth century, particularly in the Nordic kingdoms.⁴ In what follows, overseas business refers to how individuals, trading companies, and states organised, planned, and maintained long-distance trade. Rather than merely studying how trade (the selling and buying of goods) was conducted, the business perspective adopted here concerns the overall structure of economic activities overseas. Business is understood as part of a long-distance economic system, in which goods and services were important, as were various forms of financial activities. Furthermore, within this context, personal privileges and prerogatives acquired a political dimension. In this sense, business-as-trade and business-as-organisation were two inextricably connected subjects.

The book revolves around the concept of overseas entrepreneurship. Each chapter focuses on a theme directly related to this concept. The concept of overseas entrepreneurship encapsulates the way in which individuals manoeuvred between competing networks in Europe and overseas, their unlimited access to asymmetric information, and how these elements were used to attain professional advancement and personal wealth. Through such processes, Leyel and Carloff accumulated experience, knowledge, connections, and reputation, ultimately attaining considerable upward social mobility. Finally, although entrepreneurship is often associated with attempts to reduce risk and avoid conflicts, in the overseas context, conflict and violence became instruments that enabled entrepreneurs to attain competitive advantages. A focus on the careers of Leyel, Carloff, and their entrepreneurial behaviour means posing questions such as: What were the backgrounds and the mechanisms of overseas entrepreneurship? How did these relate to the Nordic institutional context of the seventeenth century? By studying the entrepreneurial behaviour of individuals in relation to trading companies, this book will offer new insights into early modern European, and especially Nordic, overseas business.

The historiography of overseas expansion, trade, and business

Historians have been interested in European overseas expansion and trade for a long time. Since the nineteenth century, research has considered the motives, goals, and development of European overseas expansion. From the early twentieth century onwards, research on specific nations gained momentum. In Western Europe, research focused especially on the institutions that underpinned expansion, particularly the Dutch and English trading companies. Studies by James Tracy, George Scammel, Niels Steensgaard, Femme Gaastra and Leonard Blussé pioneered ideas about the role of European overseas trade in a broader context, comparing and contrasting various European trading empires.⁵

During the twentieth century, a regional approach to overseas trade also developed. In large part, this was a reaction against the somewhat one-sided focus on the role of European institutions such as the chartered companies. The rise of Indian and Atlantic Ocean historiography demonstrated that European expansion had repercussions on local populations, and, indeed, that the latter were far from passive, helpless, or inconsequential. Overall, this body of literature has clarified how local, non-European societies participated in European overseas business. The interactions between the local populations and the Europeans proved to be heavily intertwined. Furthermore, such studies of the Indian and Atlantic oceans have sparked interest in regional systems of trade. They have also addressed a wide range of other topics, including demography, economics, politics, religion, and ideas, as well as structures, trade, societies, and environments. Such oceanic perspectives have also yielded an understanding of the diversity of actors in the construction of trading systems, whether affiliated with the European chartered companies or not. In turn, this provided a more nuanced framework for the study of overseas trade, one which not only focuses on the perspective of states and companies but also considers the participation of European and non-European agents in the construction of early modern empires.⁶

Today, most scholars who work on European overseas expansion agree that the scope of analysis needs to be more inclusive in terms of European versus non-European agency. However, it is rather surprising that most studies are still conducted with a specific geographical region in mind. For example, in the Netherlands, the two main areas of expansion – the Asian (East) and the Atlantic (West) – have largely been treated separately. For a long time, the focus has been on the Dutch expansion into Asia, whereas the Atlantic expansion has begun to receive attention only during the last few decades.⁷ From a Dutch perspective, trade in Asia was more successful, whereas Atlantic trade tended to falter. In general, the WIC has been perceived as an instrument for supporting warfare, whereas the East India Company (VOC) has been seen as a trading company, and, indeed, as the first modern joint-stock company.⁸

Conventionally, this distinction has also been explained with reference to how the two regions changed following the arrival of the Europeans. The Asian trade was an already established trading system prior to the entry of the Europeans, whereas the Atlantic trade was largely developed by the Europeans. Furthermore, the Atlantic trade has been considered more open and dynamic, due to shorter sailing distances and relative closeness to Europe. The Atlantic companies were weaker, and were thus more vulnerable to internal and external competition. In contrast, the Asian trade has been considered more closed. Trade in Asia required other types of organisation, since ships had to sail in convoys, due to longer distances and changing monsoon seasons. It has also been argued that the settlements established by Europeans were different. In the Atlantic, Europeans built plantation colonies (with the exception of Western Africa), whereas in Asia, they erected fortified trading stations and operated mainly through shipping services.⁹

Although the two ocean systems were not entirely the same, this does not mean that they ought not to be studied together. In fact, when greater emphasis is placed on the business patterns of the two regions, they turn out to be quite similar. In both ocean systems, companies applied violence and confronted individuals and merchant networks who challenged the companies from within. In neither system did the Europeans dominate trade. Instead, in both cases, they were dependent on the locally established powers, who exercised control over the European presence during the seventeenth century. Another problem is that the European maritime empires have mainly been studied from a “national” perspective. However, the rise of global and transnational history has shown that empires were constructed and connected through multiple contexts and relationships. As such, our understand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Formative years of overseas entrepreneurship and Nordic overseas trade
• 3 Entrepreneurship in the company
• 4 The vulnerability of being connected
• 5 Knowledge and overseas business
• 6 The sea was a violent place to work
• 7 Conclusions
• Sources and bibliography
• Index